Are You Ready to Face the Facts About Israel?

by Paul Craig Roberts

"On October 21 (1948) the Government of Israel took a decision that was to have a lasting and divisive effect on the rights and status of those Arabs who lived within its borders: the official establishment of military government in the areas where most of the inhabitants were Arabs." - Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History
I had given up on finding an American with a moral conscience and the courage to go with it and was on the verge of retiring my keyboard when I met the Rev. Thomas L. Are.
Rev. Are is a Presbyterian pastor who used to tell his Atlanta, Georgia, congregation: "I am a Zionist." Like most Americans, Rev. Are had been seduced by Israeli propaganda and helped to spread the propaganda among his congregation.
Around 1990 Rev. Are had an awakening for which he credits the Christian Canon of St. George's Cathedral in Jerusalem and author Marc Ellis, co-editor of the book, Beyond Occupation.
Realizing that his ignorance of the situation on the ground had made him complicit in great crimes, Rev. Are wrote a book hoping to save others from his mistake and perhaps in part to make amends, Israeli Peace/Palestinian Justice, published in Canada in 1994.
Rev. Are researched his subject and wrote a brave book. Keep in mind that 1994 was long prior to Walt and Mearsheimer's recent book, which exposed the power of the Israel Lobby and its ability to control the explanation Americans receive about the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
Rev. Are begins with an account of Israel's opening attack on the Palestinians, an event which took place before most Americans alive today were born. He quotes the distinguished British historian, Arnold J. Toynbee: "The treatment of the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 (and 1948) was as morally indefensible as the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis. Though nor comparable in quantity to the crimes of the Nazis, it was comparable in quality."
Golda Meir, considered by Israelis as a great leader and by others as one of history's great killers, disputed the facts: "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."
Golda Meir's apology for Israel's great crimes is so counter-factual that it blows the mind. Palestinian refugee camps still exist outside Palestine filled with Palestinians and their descendants whose towns, villages, homes and lands were seized by the Israelis in 1948. Rev. Are provides the reader with Na'im Ateek's description of what happened to him, an 11-year old, when the Jews came to take Beisan on May 12, 1948. Entire Palestinian communities simply disappeared.
In 1949 the United Nations counted 711,000 Palestinian refugees.
In 2005 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency estimated 4.25 million Palestinians and their descendants were refugees from their homeland.
The Israeli policy of evicting non-Jews has continued for six decades. On June 19, 2008, the Laity Committee in the Holy Land reported in Window Into Palestine that the Israeli Ministry of Interior is taking away the residency rights of Jerusalem Christians who have been reclassified as "visitors in their own city."
On December 10, 2007, MK Ephraim Sneh boasted in the Jerusalem Post that Israel had achieved "a true Zionist victory" over the UN partition plan "which sought to establish two nations in the land of Israel." The partition plan had assigned Israel 56 percent of Palestine, leaving the inhabitants with only 44 percent. But Israel had altered this over time. Sneh proudly declared: "When we complete the permanent agreement, we will hold 78 percent of the land while the Palestinians will control 22 percent."
Sneb could have added that the 22 percent is essentially a collection of unconnected ghettos cut off from one another and from roads, water, medical care, and jobs.
Rev. Are documents that the abuse of Palestinians' human rights is official Israeli policy. Killings, torture, and beatings are routine. On May 17, 1990, the Washington Post reported that Save the Children "documented indiscriminate beating, tear-gassing and shooting of children at home or just outside the house playing in the street, who were sitting in the classroom or going to the store for groceries."
On January 19, 1988, Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, later Prime Minister, announced the policy of "punitive beating" of Palestinians. The Israelis described the purpose of punitive beating: "Our task is to recreate a barrier and once again put the fear of death into the Arabs of the area."
According to Save the Children, beatings of children and women are common. Rev. Are, citing the report in the Washington Post, writes: "Save the Children concluded that one-third of beaten children were under ten years old, and one-fifth under the age of five. Nearly a third of the children beaten suffered broken bones."
On February 8, 1988, Newsweek magazine quoted an Israeli soldier: "We got orders to knock on every door, enter and take out all the males. The younger ones we lined up with their faces against the wall, and soldiers beat them with billy clubs. This was no private initiative, these were orders from our company commander.... After one soldier finished beating a detainee, another soldier called him 'you Nazi,' and the first man shot back: 'You bleeding heart.' When one soldier tried to stop another from beating an Arab for no reason, a fist fight broke out."
These were the old days before conscience was eliminated from the ranks of the Israeli military.
In the London Sunday Times, June 19, 1977, Ralph Schoenman, executive director of the Bertrand Russell Foundation, wrote: "Israeli interrogators routinely ill-treat and torture Arab prisoners. Prisoners are hooded or blindfolded and are hung by their wrists for long periods. Most are struck in the genitals or in other ways sexually abused. Most are sexually assaulted. Others are administered electric shock."
Amnesty International concluded that "there is no country in the world in which the use of official and sustained torture is as well established and documented as in the case of Israel."
Even the pro-Israeli Washington Post reported: "Upon arrest, a detainee undergoes a period of starvation, deprivation of sleep by organized methods and prolonged periods during which the prisoner is made to stand with his hands cuffed and raised, a filthy sack covering the head. Prisoners are dragged on the ground, beaten with objects, kicked, stripped and placed under ice-cold showers."
Sounds like Abu Gharib. There are news reports that Israeli torture experts participated in the torture of the detainees assembled by the American military as part of the Bush Regime's propaganda onslaught to convince Americans that Iraq was overflowing with al-Qaeda terrorists. On July 23, 2008, Antiwar.com posted an Iraqi news report that the Iraqi government had released a total of 109,087 Iraqis that the Americans had "detained." Obviously, these "terrorist detainees" had been used for the needs of Bush Regime propaganda. No one will ever know how many of them were abused by Israeli torturers imported by the CIA.
Rev. Are's book makes sensible suggestions for resolving the conflict that Israel began. However, the problem is that Israeli governments believe only in force. The policy of the Israeli government has always been to beat, kill, and brutalize Palestinians into submission and flight. Anyone who doubts this can read the book of Israel's finest historian Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006).
Americans are a gullible and naive people. They have been complicit for 60 years in crimes that in Arnold Toynbee's words "are comparable in quality" to the crimes of Nazi Germany. As Toynbee was writing decades ago, the accumulated Israeli crimes might now be comparable also in quantity.
The US routinely vetoes United Nations condemnations of Israel for its brutal crimes against the Palestinians. Insouciant American taxpayers have been bled for a half century to provide the Israelis with superior military weapons with which Israelis assault their neighbors, all the while convincing America – essentially a captive nation – that Israel is the victim.
John F. Mahoney wrote: "Thomas Are reminds me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: an active pastor who comes to the unsettling realization that he and his people have been fed a terrible lie that is killing and torturing thousands of innocent men, women and children. Not without ample research and prayer does such a pastor, in turn, risk unsettling his congregation. The Reverend Are has done his homework and, I suspect, has prayed often and long during the writing of this courageous book."
Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran theologian and pastor who was executed for his active participation in the German Resistance against Nazism.
Professor Benjamin M. Weir, San Francisco Theological Seminary, wrote: "This book will make the reader squirm. It asks you to lend your voice in behalf of the voiceless."
Americans who can no longer think for themselves and who are terrified of disapproval by their peer group are incapable of lending their voices to anyone except those who control the world of propaganda in which they live.
The ignorance and unconcern of Americans is a great frustration to my friends in the Israeli peace movement. Without outside support those Israelis who believe in good will are deprived, by America's support for their government's policy of violence, of any peaceful resolution of a conflict began in 1947 by Israeli aggression against unsuspecting Palestinian villages.
Rev. Are wrote his book with the hope that the pen is mightier than the sword and that facts can crowd out propaganda and create a framework for a just resolution of the Palestinian issue. In his concluding chapter, "What Christians Can Do," Rev. Are writes: "We cannot allow others to dictate our thinking on any subject, especially on anything as important as Christian faithfulness, which is tested by an attitude towards seeking justice for the oppressed. It's a Christian's duty to know."
Duty, of course, has costs. Rev. Are writes: "Speak up for the Palestinians and you will make enemies. Yet, as Christians, we must be willing to raise issues that until now we have chosen to dodge."
More than a decade later, President Jimmy Carter, a true friend of Israel, tried again to awaken Americans' moral conscience with his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Carter was instantly demonized by the Israel Lobby.
Sixty years of efforts by good and humane people to hold Israel accountable have so far failed, but they are more important today than ever before. Israel has its captive American nation on the verge of attacking Iran, the consequences of which could be catastrophic for all concerned. The alleged purpose of the attack is to eliminate nonexistent Iranian nuclear weapons. The real reason is to eliminate all support for Hamas and Hezbollah so that Israel can seize the entire West Bank and southern Lebanon. The Bush regime is eager to do Israel's bidding, and the media and evangelical "Christian" churches have been preparing the American people for the event.
It is paradoxical that Israel is demonstrating that veracity lies not in the Christian belief in good will but in Lenin's doctrine that violence is the effective force in history and that the evangelical Christian Zionist churches agree.

'Saved'? Site Lets You Send E-mails Post-Rapture

Youvebeenleftbehind.com Lets Saved Christians Send Emails From Heaven

By ASHLEY PHILLIPS
June 10, 2008


A new Web site is offering a first-of-its-kind service: sending e-mails to nonbelieving friends and family who are "left behind" after you are whisked away by God in the rapture.

The site Youvebeenleftbehind.com offers users the ability to store e-mails and documents that will be sent to up to 63 e-mail addresses six days after the rapture has occurred. Users get up to 250 megabytes of storage space, 150 megabytes of it encrypted for sensitive information such as bank account numbers or eTrade passwords that can be accessed by those who remain on earth.

In evangelical Christian theology, the rapture is marked by a sudden visit from God, in which Christians will be whisked away to heaven while remaining nonbelievers will live on earth for seven years under the rule of the anti-Christ, until God returns with his followers to rule heaven and earth.

Billed as the last chance to "snatch them from the flames," Youvebeenleftbehind.com is the month-old brainchild of Mark Heard, a 49-year-old supermarket shelf-stocker who lives in Cape Cod, Mass.

"You've Been Left Behind gives you one last opportunity to reach your lost family and friends For Christ," the site reads. "Imagine being in the presence of the Lord and hearing all of heaven rejoice over the salvation of your loved ones. It is our prayer that this site makes it happen."

Heard says it's also a way to pass on financial information to loved ones who remain on earth before God's return.

"The idea started for me in 1999 when I was& trading equities online and trying to think, 'How I can send my password to my wife if the Rapture happened at this moment?'" he said.


A Way to Proselytize?
Jeff Vacarro, a 34-year-old computer programmer in San Diego who runs the Web site Godsurfer.com, which allows users to post and rank Christian-based Web content, signed up for the service when he saw it covered on another news site last week.

Although Vacarro hasn't uploaded any messages just yet, he says that he plans to construct e-mails that give the non-believers in his life a nudge along with Bible passages.

"I like the idea behind it," said Vacarro, "It would be one final, 'Hey guys, maybe you need to check this out further & I haven't figured out what I want to say yet."


Despite the promise of encryption, Vacarro said he wasn't planning to save personal financial information on the site.

"I'm not going to put any of my financial documents up, but sending out an e-mail who to those who don't believe & when this does happen, I thought, 'Why not?'" he said.

Security experts generally recommend only using data storage services that are well-known with a proven track record and that detail the type of security used on their sites.


When the Rapture Comes
Perhaps the trickiest detail for Heard was devising a way for the digital service to determine the spiritual fates of its clients. How will the Web site know when the rapture has come?

Heard, who wouldn't reveal how many people have signed up for the service, has set up his e-mail server with what he calls a "fail-safe" clause: if three of his five employees fail to log on to their work accounts after six days, the service will be triggered and the e-mails be sent out.

"We don't want these things to go out early," he said.


The Business of Christianity
Not all of this is being done out of the kindness of Heard's faithful heart; he does charge $40 a year for membership, a fee he hopes to lower as more people join.

Christian-themed products make up a multibillion dollar industry that includes books, movies, music, theme parks, video games and even beauty pageants, according to Peter A. Maresco, a business professor at Sacred Heart University and author of the upcoming book "The Business of Christianity: The Growing Market For Everything Christian."

"This Web site is yet another extension of the use of the Internet to reach a specific demographic  in this instance, Christians saving lost souls before and even after the rapture," Maresco said.

The best example of Christian entertainment's crossover into the secular mainstream may be the best-selling juggernaut "Left Behind" book series, a fictional account of the rapture. Since its inception the series has sold 63 million books and spawned several movies and a video game.

Maresco said the Youvebeenleftbehind site may be poised to capitalize on the huge financial success of the rapture-themed books, but the blurring of the line between profits and proselytizing has some observers concerned.

"The section used to attract subscribers left me cold. However, it does reflect the potential of a market that may reach in excess of $10 billion in the next few years," Maresco said. "If there is an opportunity to market a product or, in this case, a service to the Christian demographic, then someone will find it, develop it and ultimately market it,"

Michael Budde, Depaul University political science professor and author of the book "Christianity Incorporated: How Big Business is Buying the Church," is similarly skeptical.

"It's hard to know whether this is the church of P.T. Barnum and a sucker is born every minute or whether this is a rather curious take on what the church needs in this particular type of place," he said. "I can't see this turning into a particularly big presence because, for the millions of people this fits with, to send e-mails to the left behind  I'm not sure this is going to be worth $40 to them."


Will the Web Even Work?
Despite its infiltration into pop culture, the idea of the rapture as depicted in the "Left Behind" series is a fairly new development in Christianity, according to Randy Maddox, a theology professor at Duke divinity school.

"The understanding of the rapture as a time when Christians are taken out and [others] left behind is not a universally accepted Christian belief," Maddox said. "Indeed, the model that this Web site [promotes] is something we don't find in the Christian church until the end of the 19th Century. It's a small subset of evangelicals who have adopted this."

Similarly, the catastrophic narrative that the rapture invokes doesn't jibe with the idea of a fully-functioning Internet.

"In one sense, they're arguing it will be a time of great disaster, but in another sense he's saying, 'I promise my Web site will be working,'" Maddox said. "There are logical incongruities with the model, and there's basic theological incongruities."


'This Is Someone Who Wants $40'
Several things rang alarm bells for Amy Frykholm, author of the book "Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America," a scholarly look at the "Left Behind" series and a writer for "Christian Century."

While Heard's site claims to be "for Christians by Christians," it never identifies who is running it, a point which Frykholm said made her instantly suspicious.

"I was shocked that there was no place on the site where you could find out more about the Rapture. & You don't know who these people are," Frykholm said. "My first thought: 'This is someone who wants $40.'"

According to Frykholm, people who believe in the rapture, also known as dispensationlists, are almost always evangelizing, something that doesn't happen on the site.

"That makes me very, very suspicious. I just expected something more, some attempt to reach me as the unsaved," she said. "You justify taking people's money by spreading the kingdom of God. There's nothing there to justify taking your money. & I'd be stunned if people are signing up for this."

Tim LaHaye, one of the authors of the "Left Behind" series, was less skeptical. He and co-writer Jerry B. Jenkins have been pitched several ideas over the years about communicating with those left behind after the rapture, from videos to bumper stickers, but have so far not endorsed any of them.

LaHaye called the Web site "likely very sincere."

"It is not a bad idea to leave behind some type of message for your loved ones or neighbors, giving them the plan of salvation and an explanation for your immediate disappearance," LaHaye said in an e-mailed statement. He added that Christians should talk to family and friends about their beliefs now.

In explaining his hopes for the site, Heard stressed his own strongly-held beliefs, reciting Bible verses in one breath and discussing server security in the next.

Though he won't reveal number of people who have signed up for the service, Heard says that there's been a fair amount of interest from other Christians  particularly those preparing for what they believe is inevitable.

"Nobody knows the day or the hour of the rapture," he said. "It's really an any-minute situation."


Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

The Voice of the White House for June 7th 2008

Washington , D.C., : “Not only is our beloved President sliding off the muddy cliff into the cesspit of public oblivion, he is dragging the far-right Republicans and the pro-Israeli neocons with him. Added to this mixed bag of fruits and nuts, we also have the evangelical Christians who are loud, vicious and entirely crazy.

McCain, who has the acumen of a jar of pond scum, chased the lunatic Christian nut, John Hagee, around, panting after his endorsement. McCain must be living back in the Coolidge administration because the so-called Christian Right has been repudiated by most Americans and their endless rantings about abortion and gays are falling on very deaf ears.

Now, we learn that the pathetic Hagee is claiming the fictional anti-Christ is going to be both Jewish and gay! It has always been a curiosity to me, and others, that born-again freakos loathe gays so much. Given the Haggard revelations, I strongly suspect that the loudest gay-bashers secretly lust after other men and are filled with self-hatred.

These pin heads are in love with the Book of Revelations which most historians know was written a hundred years after the early Christian era by the inmate of a Roman lunatic colony on the island of Patmos . They love this nonsense because you can read into it anything you want…and they do, regularly. Hagee has also said that Hitler was a Jew, which he wasn’t, and that God made Hitler go after the Jews to force them to repopulate the Holy Land !

Most of the Jews who fled to Palestine in 1946-1948 are not even ethnic Jews but are descended from Caspian Sea Turkish tribes and have about as much historical right there as Canadian geese.

If it isn’t the idiot Hagee bellowing about evil gays, it’s professional Jews screaming about 800 passenger gas vans and twenty millions barbecued. This is what comes of promulgating Political Correctness. No one dares to speak out against this sort of imbecilic propaganda just as one cannot poke fun at Mongoloids, dwarves or urine colored people. Don’t forget the old law of physics: Every action has a reaction. I’m waiting, eagerly, for it.”

Conversations with the Crow: Part 4

Editor’s note: When we ran the first conversation, there was the question of reader interest and acceptability. It is pleasant to report that our server was jammed with viewers and the only other tbrnews story that has had more viewers was our Forward Base Falcon story that had a half a million viewers in less that two days. We are now going to reprint all of the Crowley conversations, including a very interesting one on John McCain, in chronological sequence. It is also pleasant to note that two publishers and three reporters have all expressed concrete interest in the Crowley conversations.

On October 8th, 2000 , Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA's Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer's Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley 's widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley 's CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley , died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda , Md.

After Corson's death, Trento and a well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson's bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled 'Zipper.' This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley 's involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento 's house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

When published material concerning the CIA's actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA's horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA's activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious 'Regional Interrogation Centers' in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid "historians" and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley 's survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files our of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement , secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago , Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in military intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

One of Crowley ’s first major assignments within the agency was to assist in the recruitment and management of prominent World War II Nazis, especially those with advanced intelligence experience. One of the CIA’s major recruitment coups was Heinrich Mueller, once head of Hitler’s Gestapo who had fled to Switzerland after the collapse of the Third Reich and worked as an anti-Communist expert for Masson of Swiss counterintelligence. Mueller was initially hired by Colonel James Critchfield of the CIA, who was running the Gehlen Organization out of Pullach in southern Germany . Crowley eventually came to despise Critchfield but the colonel was totally unaware of this, to his later dismay.

Crowley ’s real expertise within the agency was the Soviet KGB. One of his main jobs throughout his career was acting as the agency liaison with corporations like ITT, which the CIA often used as fronts for moving large amounts of cash off their books. He was deeply involved in the efforts by the U.S. to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile , which eventually got him into legal problems with regard to investigations of the U.S. government’s grand jury where he has perjured himself in an agency cover-up

After his retirement, Crowley began to search for someone who might be able to write a competent history of his career. His first choice fell on British author John Costello (author of Ten Days to Destiny, The Pacific War and other works) but, discovering that Costello was a very aggressive homosexual, he dropped him and tentatively turned to Joseph Trento who had assisted Crowley and William Corson in writing a book on the KGB. When Crowley discovered that Trento had an ambiguous and probably cooperative relationship with the CIA, he began to distrust him and continued his search for an author.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. . In 1996, Crowley , Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley ’s story but only after Crowley ’s death. Douglas , for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.

In 1998, when Crowley was slated to go into the hospital for exploratory surgery, he had his son, Greg, ship two large foot lockers of documents to Douglas with the caveat that they were not to be opened until after Crowley ’s death. These documents, totaled an astonishing 15,000 pages of CIA classified files involving many covert operations, both foreign and domestic, during the Cold War.

After Crowley ’s death and Trento ’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley ’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley ’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas . No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.

All of this furor eventually came to the attention of Dr. Peter Janney, a Massachusetts clinical psychologist and son of Wistar Janney, another career senior CIA official, colleague of not only Bob Crowley but Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Jim Angleton and others. Janney was working on a book concerning the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, former wife of Cord Meyer, a high-level CIA official, and later the mistress of President John F. Kennedy. Douglas had authored a book, ‘Regicide’ which dealt with Crowley ’s part in the Kennedy assassination and he obviously had access to at least some of Crowley ’s papers. Janney was very well connected inside the CIA’s higher levels and when he discovered that Douglas had indeed known, and had often spoken with, Crowley and that after Crowley’s death, the FBI had descended on Crowley’s widow and son, warning them to never speak with Douglas about anything, he contacted Douglas and finally obtained from him a number of original documents, including the originals of the transcribed conversations with Robert Crowley.

In spite of the burn bags, the top secret safes and the vigilance of the CIA to keep its own secrets, the truth has an embarrassing and often very fatal habit of emerging, albeit decades later.

While CIA drug running , money-launderings and brutal assassinations are very often strongly rumored and suspected, it has so far not been possible to actually pin them down but it is more than possible that the publication of the transcribed and detailed Crowley-Douglas conversations will do a great deal towards accomplishing this.

These many transcribed conversations are relatively short because Crowley was a man who tired easily but they make excellent reading. There is an interesting admixture of shocking revelations on the part of the retired CIA official and often rampant anti-social (and very entertaining) activities on the part of Douglas but readers of this new and on-going series are gently reminded to always look for the truth in the jest!

Date: Wednesday, March 20, 1996
Commenced: 9;32 AM(CST)
Concluded: 10:08 AM (CST)

RTC: Hello, Gregory. Sorry I was out the last time you called but we were off on family business. My son’s family. By the way, I have some information for you that might interest you. You know, there are a number of people here who are not happy with you and they are certainly not pleased that I am talking with you. Not at all. This morning I had a call from some shit at Justice who wanted to warn me, being a friendly and caring person of course, that you were a very bad person and I would ruin my reputation by telling you anything. He had a similar talk with Corson yesterday. Bill called me last night about this and we both laughed about it. This is a sure sign that you must be right. Both of us know you were friends with Mueller and the thought of him loose in America is something the Company and now Justice does not want talked about. First off, they don’t know what name he used while he was here.

GD: Are you serious, Robert?

RTC: Oh yes, very. You see, the CIA and don’t forget the Army, used high-level Nazis after the Cold War broke out. We especially went after the Gestapo and SD people because they had the most to do with fighting the Communists, both in German in the ‘30s and then during the war.

GD: I knew Gehlen very well and met some of them. I agree. His top recruiter was old Willi Krichbaum who was a Colonel in the SS and a top Gestapo person. I talked many times with Willi who had been in the Freikorps after the first war and he was quite a fellow. He was Mueller’s top deputy in the Gestapo and in charge of the border guards at one time. And, don’t forget, Willi was head of the Wehrmacht’s Geheime Feldpolizei who had a terrible reputation with the troops. Hanging deserters at the end of the war. Yes, Gehlen told me the SS intelligence men were his best people.

RTC: You have a grasp of this from the time, don’t you. So, of course no one now wants to infuriate the rah-rah patriotic idiots and most especially the Jews by letting anyone know about this. You see, they brought Mueller and others over here and gave them new names and identities. The higher they had been, the more they concealed them. Now your friend Mueller’s name was known to Truman, Beetle Smith, Critchfield, Gehlen and about three others. Now that everyone is dead and you are tearing open old caskets, they are absolutely frantic to find out what name Mueller was here under and actually so they can run around the files and burn anything with that name on it. Then they can say, like the pious frauds they are, that Oh no, we never heard of that person. We searched our records, sir, and believe us, there was no such person anywhere. That’s what they want. Smith is dead, Truman is ditto, Critchfield will never talk because he ran Mueller and still has his pension to consider. I know the name but they have never brought the subject up to me. They think you’re a loose cannon, Gregory, with no loyalty to the system and they think I am getting daft in my old age and marginalize me.

GD: Think they’ll shoot me? A boating accident? Something like that?

RTC: When I was in harness, yes, they would. A bungled robbery or a rape like Kennedy’s lady friend but not now. Besides, they don’t know what you have on them and if you were crushed to death by an elephant falling out of a plane, who knows what might come out? I have to send you some documentation which you then have to let them know you have. But in a safe place, not in a local storage locker under your name or in your attic or garage. A gentle hint of joys to come. I have hinted at that and very strongly. The Justice oaf today got an earful from me and when I told him I would tell you about this, he got scared and hung up on me. Now, I can expect Tom Kimmel to call me and try to find out if I’ve told you or given you anything. You know, you got some rare documents that were very helpful to his case to clear the Admiral but now he’s a torn person. The family want desperately to accept these as genuine but are furious that you, a terrible person in their eyes, had them. No gratitude. I suppose if that awful Wolfe had found them and passed them along, he would be a great hero to the Kimmel family but you are one whose name is never to be mentioned. You know, Gregory, I find this very entertaining. And Kimmel is horrified that Bill and I like you and talk to you. Both of us have been warned, I by people from the Company I haven’t seen since I retired and Bill by the fringe wannabees like Trento and others. I think it’s time we nailed Critchfield, don’t you?

GD: I’m game, Robert. If he ran Mueller, he must be scared.

RTC: Will be scared shitless. In the old days, he’d have had you killed at once but those days are no more. You knew Gehlen and that will be my approach. You are quick enough with in house terms so that I can convince Jimmy that you were once part of his operation. You’ll have to play it by ear but you are about ten times smarter than him so you should have fun. I want you to convince him that you were really there and knew some his people. And most important, convince him you knew Mueller. Oddly enough, Jimmy never met Mueller because he operated him out of Switzerland through Willi and later, Mueller moved up the ladder to the point where Jimmy had no access to him. Let’s keep his bowels open, Gregory, what do you say?

GD: I have no problem. Should I tape him?

RTC: Why not get him on a speaker phone with both a tape recorder going and a reputable witness? That way, if something comes of this and they get to the witness, you have a backup.

GD: I have a retired colonel acquaintance who was with your people in ‘ Nam . He’d be perfect as a witness. Just let me know. Is Justice going to do something nasty to me?

RTC: God no. They just want to scare me off of you, that’s all. They’re all such pinheads, Gregory. They chatter like old whores at a tea party and I can remind you that gossip is king here. Everyone inside the Beltway runs around like the little self-important toads that they are, pretending to be really important. They see a Senator in a restaurant, wave at him and get waved at back. This impresses their client who does not realize that the Senator will always wave back on the assumption that the waver might be someone important he might have forgotten. And they tell you that the President, or the Secretary of this or that said this to them when no one knows them at the White House or anywhere else. This jerk from Justice is a small, malformed cog in a big and brainless machine. Typical. I had to deal with these punks for years and I have more respect for a black tart, believe me. At least they don’t try to hide the fact that they fuck for money.

GD: (Laughter)

RTC: It really isn’t funny. If the public was aware of the crooked, lying sacks of shit that run this country, they would be boiling the tar and preparing the chicken feathers.

GD: You know, speaking of Gehlen, he told me in ’51 that his famous ’48 report about the Russians being poised to invade Europe was made up at the Army’s specific request. Gehlen told me that far from moving hundreds of armored units into the east zone, the Russians had torn up all the railroad tracks after the war and shipped them back to Russia . And most of the armored divisions were only cadre.

RTC: But it did work, didn’t it? Big business got to gear up for a fictional coming war and the military got a huge boost.

GD: Ever heard of General Trudeau?

RTC: Oh yes, I knew him personally. What about him?

GD: He found out about Gehlen and bitched like hell about what he called a bunch of Nazis working for the CIA and inventing stories about fake invasion threats.

RTC: Now that’s something I didn’t know. You know they shipped him out of the European command and sent him to the Far East ? Yes, and I met him when I was in Hawaii . I’m surprised they didn’t do to him what they did to George Patton. A convenient truck ran into his car and shut him up.

GD: Why?

RTC: George found out that the top brass was stealing gold from the salt mine and many generals and colonels were getting very rich. And then the accident and with George dead, they just went on stealing.

GD: I can use that.

RTC: I can get you some paper on that out of my files. Patton was strange but one of our better generals. Lying thieves. Gold has a great attraction for people, I guess.

GD: A few years ago, one of your boys, Jimmy Atwood and I went down into Austria to dig up some Nazi gold. Atwood is a terrible asshole but very useful. I think he viewed me the same way. Anyway, we had a former SS officer and a Ukrainian camp guard along. What a wonderful adventure, Robert.

RTC: Were you successful? Treasure hunts rarely are.

GD: Oh, very. And we brought most of it back with us.

RTC: How ever did you get it through customs?

GD: Boat. Brought it in by boat. I’ll tell you about this some time. Did you ever hear about it?

RTC: No, I didn’t. Should I have?

GD: Probably a rogue operation. Two Limeys got knocked on the head and put over the side on the way to the Panama Canal but other than that, it was an uneventful trip.

RTC: Well, someday, I’ll discuss the Kennedy assassination and you can tell me about the gold hunt. Sounds fair?

GD: Oh yes, why not?

RTC: I remember the time we had to fly the KMT general out of Burma with an Air America transport full of gold. He was our boy out there but he had a hankering to make more money so he began to raise opium and used our weapons to kill of the locals. Thirteen million in gold and twelve trunks full of opium. Quite a problem getting it all into Switzerland and into a bank. But he performed and we kept our word. That fucking Colby was into drugs as well.

GD: William?

RTC: Yes, our beloved DCI. A nasty piece of work, Gregory. Was working in SEA doing the drug business when he was tapped for PHOENIX . And just kept on going when he got to Saigon . PHOENIX got to be a really nasty business and Bill set up torture centers all over our part of the country. Regional Intelligence Centers they called them. Well, Church got his hands on some of the goings on and guess what? Colby snitched on all his co-workers. I know for a fact from some of the old ones that they’re going to kill him for that. I remember he has some kind of a telephone device hidden in his glasses. Princeton man. You can always tell a Princeton man, Gregory, but you can’t tell him very much. Watch the papers pretty soon.

GD: How will they nail him? Run down in a crosswalk? A stampede of elephants flatten him in his garden?

RTC: You have an overheated imagination. I don’t know the how but I do know the why. Give it six months and the Dictator of Dent Place will be another stone in the cemetery.

GD: What about the one who killed himself by tying weights to his legs and shooting himself in the back of the head before jumping off his boat?

RTC: John Arthur Paisley. He used to be the deputy director of the Office of Strategic Research. Paisley . Tragic. Shouldn’t have sold out to the Russians. He was such a rotten mess when they found him that it took weeks to do an ID on him. There’ve been more.

GD: I have a packet coming in from overseas and the mail truck is at the end of the block. Let me ring off now, Robert and I can call you back later today.

RTC: Make it tomorrow. OK? Things to do.

(Concluded at 10:08 AM CST )

John Hagee: deviant theology, dangerous foreign policy

By John Taylor
Online Journal Contributing Writer

May 7, 2008, 00:21

Pastor John Hagee gleefully anticipates the death of hundreds of millions of people in a series of wars preparing the world for the second coming of Christ: “The end of the world is rapidly approaching . . . Rejoice and be exceeding glad.”

Worse, Hagee wants to jump start what he sees as the inevitable battle between Israel and the US and an alliance of the Islamic states and Russia: “The United States must join Israel in a preemptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West.” Hagee’s bizarre interpretation of the Bible sees war with Iran as a “biblically prophesized End Time confrontation . . . which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation and the Second Coming.”

If Hagee were just another kook, walking around Times Square carrying a sign saying “The End is Near,” there would be no need to worry. In fact, Hagee is senior pastor of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, with a congregation of 18,000, appears weekly on 150 TV stations around the world and is the head of Christians United For Israel (CUFI), a lobbying group founded to advance the interests of the State of Israel in the U.S. Congress. Not only does Hagee advocate aggressive war against Iran, he is a strong supporter of our continuing misadventure in Iraq and he opposes any Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, arguing that God has given all of Palestine to the Israelis.

John Hagee’s end time theology transmogrifies Christianity into little more than a death cult in which the State of Israel is worshipped like a latter day Golden Calf. Despite his weird views, Hagee has access to senior politicians in the US and Israel; he likes to brag that he has met every Israeli prime minister since Menachem Begin.

President Bush praised Hagee’s CUFI for “spreading the hope of God’s love and the universal gift of freedom.” How to square “spreading . . . God’s love” and the “gift of freedom” with bombing the Iranians is hard to fathom, but, in any event, evangelicals like Hagee have been among President Bush’s strongest supporters and the president is not about to abandon them now.

Senator Joe Lieberman is also a Hagee fan and praised him at last year’s CUFI meeting in Washington, likening him to Moses, “a man of God . . . leading a mighty multitude.” If comparing Hagee to Moses seems over the top, remember Hagee and Lieberman have a lot in common. Both men were keen to see the US invade Iraq and both would like to have Uncle Sam attack Syria and Iran, a wish shared by many in Washington, especially arms makers, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and neocons in the White House and the Pentagon.

John McCain recently thanked Pastor Hagee for endorsing his run for the presidency. Eight years ago, McCain made a point of denouncing Hagee’s fellow evangelical Jerry Falwell as an “agent of intolerance” and an “evil influence on the Republican party.” Clearly times have changed.

Hagee’s distorted view of Christianity, his hatred of Islam (Hagee once said "those who live by the Koran have a scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews”) and his toxic criticism of American Middle East policy have all become part of American political discourse. For example, Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma believes “We are Israel’s best friend . . . because of the character we have as a nation . . . This is not a political battle at all. It is a contest over whether or not the word of God is true.” Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey opined, “I am content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank . . . I happen to believe the Palestinians should leave.” And just a few months ago, presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, an ex-evangelical preacher himself, said he favored the establishment of a Palestinian state, but not in Palestine, rather in Egypt or Saudi Arabia.

Many people, some influential, some not, think religious belief should guide American Middle East policy. Others would say that that the Bible and foreign policy ought to remain entirely separate and that a discussion of Hagee’s religious doctrine is about as meaningful as trying to decide how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. What individuals on both sides of this debate don’t realize is that Hagee’s highly selective reading and strange interpretation of the Bible put him well outside mainstream Christian belief.

Hagee regards God’s covenant with Abraham in the book of Genesis as granting the Patriarch and his descendents unconditional title to the Holy Land. He concludes, therefore, that no territorial compromise with the Palestinians is desirable or necessary. Hagee preaches that those who bless Israel will themselves be blessed (Genesis 12:3) and that a close military and political alliance between the United States and Israel is mandated in scripture. Further, Hagee sees the 1948 emergence of an independent Israel as a sign of the second coming of Christ. Finally, and most controversial of all for an evangelical preacher, Hagee claims that God’s covenant with the ancient Hebrews allows Jews to be saved without belief in Christ.

Did God grant Abraham and his offspring unconditional and eternal possession of the Holy Land? Many scholars would argue that remaining in the land required the Israelites to keep God’s laws. Failure to do so would bring divine punishment. Moses warned in Deuteronomy 28, “If you are not careful to do all the words of this law . . . you shall be plucked off the land that you are entering to take possession of.” The Hebrews’ captivity in Babylon and the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in 70 AD demonstrate to many scholars that God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendents was conditional and their right to the Holy Land by no means absolute.

When Hagee advocates unqualified American support for the State of Israel as a means of obtaining the Almighty’s blessing, he assumes the modern State of Israel is a linear and worthy successor to Abraham. Does blessing Israel mean giving the government of the State of Israel unconditional political, financial and military support? One could argue that Israel’s efforts to colonize the lands captured in 1967 and to dispossess the Palestinians violate the Old Testament commandments against theft and killing. Furthermore, Hagee’s callous disregard for the suffering of indigenous Christians and Muslims is certainly contrary to the New Testament injunctions to “love thy neighbor as thy self” (Matt. 19:19) and to “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” (Matt. 7:12), to say nothing of “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God” (Matt. 5:9). Hagee’s bizarre theology has hijacked the messages of the Old and New Testaments to sanctify the injustices done in the Holy Land.

The second coming of Christ is a difficult issue because the Bible can be interpreted in many ways. In his book, Jerusalem Countdown, Hagee enumerates 10 “signs” which he claims “prove” that Christ’s return to earth is imminent. But Luke’s gospel (17: 20) gives a diametrically opposing view: “The Kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed.” Furthermore, Pastor Hagee may say he knows when Christ is returning but his confidence is inconsistent with the parable of the bridegroom (Matt. 25): “you know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.”

Most people who have studied the Christian religion, believers or not, would assert that the New Testament requires belief in Christ for salvation: that is, after all, what makes Christians Christians and the New Testament new. Hagee’s interpretation of scripture posits that salvation for Jews is also possible in Christianity because of God’s covenant with Abraham. Pastor Hagee’s view is obviously erroneous: the gospel of John states, “I (Christ) am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6)

It is easy to understand why Hagee preaches what he does. If you make the State of Israel an object of veneration and at the same time insist that its inhabitants convert to Christianity, you are not going to make many friends in Israel or among Israel’s supporters in the US. And for similar reasons Hagee asserts the Bible favors the Israelis over the Palestinians: Pastor Hagee obviously enjoys meeting Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, speaking in front of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee and having Malcolm Hoenlein, the head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, visit him in San Antonio. Hagee bartered his faith for power and fame, money and notoriety. An advocate of unjust war, Hagee has put down the Bible and taken up the sword. His kingdom is very much of this world.

The Founding Fathers were wise to forbid in the Constitution the establishment of a religion in the US. Although morality, often finding its roots in religion, will always influence government and election of public officials, the specifics of religious belief and practice have been kept, for the most part, in private life, to the nation’s great benefit. Making decisions about war and peace based on strange interpretations of arcane End Time prophecy is dangerous and absurd. That Hagee is a serious political player in 21st Century America shows we have truly entered a post Enlightenment era.

John Taylor, a lifelong Republican, received an AB in Near Eastern Languages from The University of Chicago. He is a US Army veteran. As a young man he served in the Middle East as a civil servant, archaeologist and banker. Prior to retirement he worked in the energy business in Texas for 20 years.

Should the United States Worry About “Zionists” as Fifth Column?

Yes.

Jefferson Corner/ Kenny's Sideshow

Last week calls by candidate Hillary Clinton to obliterate Iran for and on behalf of Israel and her willingness to commit to nuclear war costing the lives of hundreds of millions of people for and on behalf of a state that since its inception has been at war with all of its close and distant neighbor is a grave warning to Americans of the danger of Zionism on America and the world.

In few weeks President George Bush will lead a delegation of “Whose Who” in politics, government, business, media and arts and head east to Tel-Aviv to their “Mecca” to celebrate and give allegiance to the State of Israel on its 60th anniversary. Europeans will be celebrating for having gotten rid of the majority of Jews within Europe.

Since its inception in the late 18th century Europe, the zionist movement worked so hard to transform All Jewish communities within the West in its own image and tried and have succeeded to a great extent to transform the US and European Jewry to loyal followers and Israeli loyalists resurrecting the feelings of alienation among world Jewry to their own countries and of course reigniting again the horrible seeds of anti-semitism. The measure of success of the zionist enterprise is its ability to disfranchise old established Jewish communities in their native countries and countries of birth and citizenship and give them their “choice” of immigrating to Israel, the only place “where Jews can feel Jews”.

To this end trillions of dollars of “Jewish” money and from citizens tax payers from around the world were committed to Israel building its new infrastructure based on defense, armaments and Spartan siege mentality. Unlike the claims of zionists of having made the desert bloom, Palestine was a thriving community with well known products around the world such as Jaffa oranges. With Trillions of dollars pouring into Israel and with an already thriving Palestinian community, one can make the “moon bloom”. Hence the Zionist myth of making the “desert bloom” we did that in Arizona and we are not zionists.

The zionist ideology based on “Jewish nationalism” fed on and in reaction to European and Western/Christian anti-semitism, pogroms and the holocaust, succeeds for the most part in converting and transforming Jewish loyalties to “their” Jewish state Israel and the zionist movement. If the Catholic church and Islam tried to convert and shift loyalties of community of the faithful from that of their national state to loyalty to Rome and Mecca, I am sure that zionists would cry foul and would charge Rome and Mecca with inciting “treason” among citizens of the world. zionism as a form of racism did succeed in making transformation of Judaism from a religion of faith to one “religious nationalism” with the Israel being the “nation” and central to Jewish life and succeeded in making the Jews feel the needs for “separate” and shifting loyalties from their native countries to that of Israel. This new zionist ideology is not different from that of the communist ideology which demanded shifting of loyalties from ones country to that of the Soviet Union and Moscow. If Islamists loyal to a foreign agenda could not be trusted or entrusted with the interests of the United States claims often raised by the likes of Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes, Charles Krauthhammer then the same can be said of zionists within the United States, they too could never be trusted with the interests of the United States since they too are loyal to a foreign agenda, Israel.

Not only did the zionist movement demand Jewish loyalties to zionism and Israel it also sought to recruit Christian evangelical movements and transformed them to Christian zionists with shifting loyalties to Israel from than of their own country especially in the United States. This unholy alliance came about as an alliance between Israel’s Likud party and right wing Republicans during the Reagan administration where each was supporting the other for their own domestic and international agenda, especially in oppositions toward peace between Israel and the Arabs. Of course we all know the agenda of evangelical zionists which is the ultimate conversion of Jews or putting them to death in fulfillment of biblical prophecies. Such is the unholy alliance.

In the hey day of the Soviet Union, it succeeded to a limited extent in having a”fifth” column within the government of the United States. The Zionists went even further, they made sure that committed and loyal zionists are in every branch of the US government and in key positions, in the White House, Justice Department, Home Land Security, State, Defense, CIA, NSC and other key security agencies, especially in US Congress where key decision makers, staffers are loyal zionists. However it was not enough for the zionists to have such an army of Israeli loyalists among the tens of thousands in government, it made sure that it also spread its tentacles to the media, art and culture and of course in business, hence the danger to Western democracies and to the world in general.

The arrest two week ago of the 84 years old American Jew, Ben-Ami Kadish on charges of spying for Israel is but a tip of the iceberg where committed zionists with loyalties to zionism and Israel are in the tens of thousands within the different branches of government especially the State and other security agencies, with many security agencies employing dual nationals (Israelis and US) and employing former members of Mossad in key positions with US security agencies...

This commitment and loyalty to Israel was and is the driving force behind many of the very dangerous acts and decisions taken by officials within the different US administration. The Ben-Ami Kadish case is but on case, to be added to the Pollard case and many other cases the government simply refuses to bring out into the open.

One has to keep in mind the many incidents where zionists put the interests of Israel first. The case of the missing/stolen 100 kilogram of uranium 235 missing from the Apollo plant in Pennsylvania is but one of those incidents where the managing director of the plants having strong ties to Israel. The same is true of the case the nine kilogram of weapon grade uranium found missing from Erwin, Tennessee. The case of the missing two tons of uranium missing during a trip between Antwerp to Genoa but an added story to Zionists loyalty to Israel where the owner of the ship was identified by the Norwegian as an Israeli secret agent.

In the United States, the zionists tentacles are found every where. Lyndon Johnson as president under the influence of his “zionist “ national security advisor Walter Rastow made sure that nuclear capabilities of the F-4 Phantoms delivered to Israel where left intact in violation of the US export regulation, even refusing to fully investigate the case of the missing nuclear fuel from the Apollo plant.

More dangerous was Johnson's total disregard of the lives of US sailors killed in cold blood by Israeli jets and torpedo boats on the USS Liberty with Johnson's Jewish national security agency director snuffing out any resolution and finding Israel responsible for the cold blooded murder. Admiral McCain (father of John McCain) as Commander of US Sixth Fleet denied help to the attacked ship and its dead and injured crew on orders from the Zionists within the White House. In the 73' War, Kissinger a die hard zionist almost caused a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union in his attempt to save Israel in the first few days of the October War, stripping the US army of its tanks and missiles in Europe and flying military equipment directly to the battle field in an added attempt to save Israel while putting the US and its armed forces in Europe at risk. However Kissinger's committment to Israel did not stop there. He made sure he got rid of all “Arabists” within the State Department for fear that they may be hostile to Israel. Kissinger's decisions again, were based on his zionist ideology and not based on the US national security interest.

Zionists with the State and Defense Departments were the driving force behind Cheney-Bush War on Iraq. It is their zionism and loyalty to Israel, that was the driving force for getting the US committed to war. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearl, Douglas Feith, Elliot Abrams and William Kristol are all zionists with loyalties to the zionist agenda and Israel, are fully responsible for the death of more than 4,000 US soldiers, responsible for the more than 40,000 combat injuries, more than a million Iraqis dead and of course the more than $ 600,000 Billions the cost so far, of the War on Iraq. All of that for and on behalf of Israel. These zionists with their loyalties to Israel are similar to Communists with their loyalties to Moscow. However the George Bush administration is not the only administration to put zionists in charge of the US policies in the Middle East. Bill Clinton entrusted US policies in the Middle East to key staffers who came directly from Israeli/zionist work shop. Dennis Ross and Martin Indyke where and are committed zionists and Israeli loyalists...

Presidential candidates John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama should think twice before making loyalty to Israel and zionism the central theme of their presidential campaign. How about putting America first for a change?

Jefferson Corner

Thoughts on the Bible by Michael Rivero

Sunday, April 13, 2008

We cannot know what the real historical Jesus said and did because the written record has been subject to editing and alteration for 2000 years by church leaders with varying and often conflicting agendas.

It is known that there are numerous translation errors on the path from Aramaic to English. For example, in describing Joseph of Arimathea's request to Pontius Pilate for Jesus' body, the original texts used the word "Soma", a word that describes an unconscious body. Had Jesus been truly dead, the word "Ptoma" would have been more appropriate. In Latin, Jesus' mother is described with the word "Virgo", which simply means a young woman. The proper Latin phrase for a young woman who has not yet engaged in sex would be "Virgo Intacta", but this phrase is NOT used in the early Latin texts that describe Jesus' mother.

Then we have the discovery by Professor Morton Smith of a document written by Bishop Clement of Alexandria which proves that the Book of Mark has been edited, and a portion or the original writings deleted. Bishop Clement's justification for what could be called a sacrilege was that simply because something was the truth was no reason to allow the masses to know it.

Even the selection of the writings used in the New Testament was agenda driven. Originally, Bishop Irenaeus insisted that the New Testament only contain four gospels, on the "logic" that there were four winds and four corners to the Earth. So, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (which were not actually authored by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John) were chosen to be "The" Bible. at the time, the texts were very different from what you see today. The earliest version of the book of Mark, for example, made no mention of a virgin birth or of a resurrection, but ends with the women at the tomb of Jesus being informed by an angel that Jesus was waiting for them in Galilee. According to this early version of Mark, the women are frightened and run off, never telling anyone what the angel told them (which raises the question of just how the person or persons who wrote that version of Mark found out about the story).

There were far more than just those four gospels at the time. There were actually hundreds of gospels in early Christianity. The vast majority never mention a virgin birth or the crucifixion, but Bishop Irenaeus intentionally chose the four that did to be the official church Bible, making the resurrection the foundation of the commercial Christian church. It was only fifty years later, when the original Mark was used as the source for the books of Matthew and Luke that the passion was added at the end. Then, Mark itself was re-written to being it into conformity with the other "orthodox" gospels.

You need to understand two things about pre-biblical times. The first was that it was not considered wrong to copy stories and ideas from one book to the other. While you and I would think it questionable to take the story of the flood from the Epic of Gilgamesh and re-write it as a story of the author's god, Moses would have had no such compunction. It was perfectly acceptable literary practice to do so in those times. Second, the very earliest of the gospels, Mark, is thought to have been written (in its first version) no less than forty years after the time Jesus supposedly died on the cross. That is forty years without books, magazines, newspapers, libraries, CNN, or the internet; forty years of stories told by word of mouth (a huge game of gossip) then written down and edited by people who never met the real Jesus or anyone who knew him.

And again, commerce and agenda drove the writings. We have all heard the canard that "The Jews' killed Jesus. This is, of course, nonsense. Had the Sanhedrin wanted Jesus dead, he would have been stoned openly and legally. Crucifixion was a specifically Roman punishment, for the specific crime of high treason against the Roman Empire. Rome had annexed Judea in 6AD, partly at the petitions of the Judeans, who preferred direct Roman rule to the continuance of the Herodian dynasty (which was of questionable legitimacy since his title was not an hereditary one). But, old quarrels and resentments combined with new abuses continued to increase hostilities. Revolution threatened the land and would finally break out in 66AD. So, at the time Jesus was alive in Judea, the Romans were constantly on the lookout for revolutionaries, whom they judged to be traitors. In all probability, Pontius Pilate condemned Jesus to crucifixion to prevent a possible uprising by his more violence-prone followers. This would explain the mocking "King of the Jews" placard tradition states was attached to the top of the cross. (Pilate may have gone along with a plot to save Jesus' life if he felt Jesus himself had had little to do with the actual plans for a revolt. So long as the revolt was discouraged, Pilate had what he wanted.)

By the time the Bible was being written, however, the Judean revolt of 66 AD had come and gone. Christianity was being sold to a primarily Roman audience, and one could hardly expect Romans to toss coins into the collection plates of a new religion that blamed Rome for the death of their deity. So, the newly expelled Jews got the blame, Rome was made to look as good as possible in the early church writings, and the new religion was a hit.

It took another 200 years (without benefit of anyone who had actually known the living Jesus) to select and edit the 27 books that comprise the New Testament. (At about the same time, at the Council of Nicea, it was finally VOTED on as to whether Jesus was divine or not.) All other gospels were declared harasies by the church and burned; a crime against history equal to the Christians' burning of the Great Library at Alexandria or the burning of the Rongo-Rongo tablets on Easter Island by Missionaries. But we know the other gospels existed because individuals who correctly understand that book burning is the hallmark of dictators and tyrants hid copies of those gospels at places like Nag Hammadi.

James Cameron used the real events of the Titanic Disaster to tell a story about his fictional characters of Jack Dawson and Rose Dewitt. But while Titanic was real, Jack and Rose are fictional. The Bible, although it contains references to real historical events to create a greater sense of reality, is quite likely also using that sense of reality to tell a fictional story.